Distant memories of the Pacific War and the deaths of fellow child-workers and comrades still bring tears to the eyes of Lee Hsueh-feng (李雪峰) and Lin Teh-hwa (林德華), two of more than 200,000 Taiwanese directly involved in World War II.
Despite the passing of the 65th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings that led to the end of the war earlier this month, there are still no formal ceremonies in Taiwan or memorials erected to commemorate former military men like Lee and Lin.
This is why they appeared at War Memorial Park in Kaohsiung City, an important military and industrial center during the Japanese colonial era from 1895 to 1945, and called for the government to pay respect to Taiwan’s World War II veterans.
“Maybe it [the lack of recognition] is because we were seen as Japanese, which we really were at the time,” said 85-year-old Lin, who joined the Japanese Imperial Navy in 1943 at 17 as a volunteer because soldiers’ families received special benefits.
Lin, who hails from central Taiwan, said he made the decision because “I had four older brothers and at 17, I feared nothing, including death.”
He was fortunate to stay in Taiwan as a naval driver instead of being sent to the South Pacific theater, but said that, nonetheless, “serving in the Japanese military was a living hell.”
Lee, on the other hand, went to Yamato City in Japan’s Kanagawa Prefecture that same year, in the first group of Taiwanese child workers, called shonenko, who answered a call from the Japanese government to build fighter planes.
In all, more than 8,000 boys aged 12 to 14 left their families, homeland and childhood with the promise of an education in Japan. However, the promises and their dreams were never fulfilled.
In December 1944, 25 Taiwanese boys were killed in a US air raid on Nagoya. Lee, at 17, was the oldest of the group, and assumed the responsibility of taking care of his “brothers,” who often got homesick and cried at night.
“We had a very hard time [in Japan], but we were a happy group of kids. Losing them [the 25 boys] just broke my heart,” Lee recalled, adding that 300 of the boys never returned to Taiwan after the war.
Those 25 boys, along with 30,304 Taiwanese soldiers killed in the war, including former president Lee Teng-hui’s (李登輝) older brother, are still remembered at Tokyo’s Yasukuni Shrine and have never officially returned to their homeland either, Lee lamented.
Lee Hsueh-feng said he often wonders how he was able to tell his grandchildren that “grandpa built fighter planes for the Japanese Imperial Air Force at your age” in a time when most university students in Taiwan have little understanding of Taiwan’s history and when some of them even think it was Japan, rather than the US, that bombed Taiwan during the war.
Liang Chih-hsiang, 82, was one of the very few who fought as a Japanese soldier in the South Pacific before being recruited and sent to China by the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government to fight Chinese Communist Party troops.
Yang Liao Shu-hsia (楊廖淑霞), 83, was a 16-year-old student in the then-Japanese occupied city of Shanghai, China, when the war in the Pacific broke out. She volunteered to be trained and serve as a military nurse and was not able to return to Taiwan until 1947.
Stories like these go on and on. Those who were involved in the war are now in their 80s and, as Lee puts it, will be “naturally fading away” soon.
“There has been so little commemoration of the war in Taiwan in which millions of people were directly or indirectly involved. This is a strange society,” Taiwan Extra-Patriot Veterans Association secretary-general Chuang Sheng-huang (莊盛晃) said.
Citing statistics from Japan’s health ministry, Chuang said that about 8,000 Taiwanese soldiers and more than 120,000 other service personnel were involved in the Pacific War. About 15,000 were listed as missing in action.
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